Historical Monthly CPM Trends on YouTube

Checking your YouTube Analytics, you may notice that your average CPMs for the month of January were lower than you expected.

This is actually normal; CPMs vary slightly throughout the year, but you’ll see the most significant differences in the months of December and January.

CPM means “Cost per Mille,” the price that advertisers pay for 1,000 impressions of their advertisement. The price they pay depends on the amount of competition in the advertising market they have, and this is highest in December, both because of the holiday shopping season and because advertisers usually like to spend any excess budget from their annual advertising budget.

This result of that is a dip in CPM rates during the month of January, caused by the lull following the rush of advertising from December. Many advertisers don’t have their new budgets for the year yet, so they just aren’t running any ad campaigns. Don’t worry though, earnings will bounce back soon!

Historical CPM Trends

We can look at data from past years to exemplify this trend, as well as identify several others. Hank Green shared his relative CPM data from the past three years in a recent blog post.

Note the visually drastic change in between December and January. It’s also interesting to notice that in general, CPMs as a whole have been increasing over the past few years, leading to increased revenue for creators.

The above data is also fairly consistent with the CPMs of Social Blade partners that we’ve aggregated over the past two and a half years. Take a look:

Social Blade partner CPMs over the past two and a half years

We’re always looking to provide as much transparency as possible here at Social Blade. If you have any questions about why you may be experiencing a particular pattern in your earnings, drop it in the comments below, and we’d love to help you out!